Cellphones look to gain a greater voice in an Internet world
By Carolyn Y. Johnson
The Boston Globe
Thursday, August 30, 2007

BOSTON: The cellphone world, dominated by giant telecommunications corporations, is colliding head-on with the Internet, where hackers abound and a good idea can grow into a Google – spawning a full-fledged mobile media industry.

The intersection of the wireless world with the Internet’s openness has long been anticipated, but it is edging closer to reality as new technologies, devices and consumer behavior finally chip away at the telephone’s long legacy as a device used for talking.

The high-profile iPhone launch cast a media spotlight on a device that is more hand-held computer than phone. Google sparred last month with wireless carriers over the rules governing the upcoming auction of the radio spectrum, used to carry calls and data. Sprint plans to build its highly anticipated wireless broadband service, called WiMax, in 2008.

The activity has created opportunities for a bunch of wireless start-ups.

“People say that it’s just a novelty now. But when the PC connected to the Internet, it transformed a word processor to a communication platform, to a media platform,” said John Puterbaugh, founder and chief strategist at Nellymoser in Arlington, Massachusetts, which takes content from places like Comedy Central and VH1 and turns it into video, audio and visuals for cellphones.

Phones are now at a place much like the PC was in the mid-1990s, Puterbaugh said, and Boston is rich with a new generation of consumer mobile companies trying to make a business in a largely undefined space.

Established local industry leaders are key to the burst of new activity.

Two companies that went public this year build the backbone infrastructure that enables carriers to send network data – Starent Networks and Airvana.

M-Qube, a company that built technology to deliver content to phones, was bought by VeriSign for $250 million late last year. Third Screen Media, a company that created a mobile advertising network, was acquired by AOL for an undisclosed amount in June.

But on top of those more established players are start-ups that are so plentiful that the mobile scene is beginning to seem crowded – even as only about 10 percent of cellphone users subscribed to a data plan in the first quarter of 2007, according to Julien Blin of the industry analyst firm IDC.

Many companies offer new ways to get content on a phone – whether it is mainstream music videos or niche content, like a foodie’s favorite video podcast, and their approaches include everything from working with carriers to trying to reach consumers directly.

Buzzwire, a company that received $4 million in venture funding, lets people stream podcasts, live radio, video clips, or other content on their phones. Groove Mobile is a mobile music company that powers the music store run by Sprint and also provides downloads and sharing services to users.

Oxy Systems earlier this year unveiled Phling, a service to allow a user to stream a music collection from a home computer onto a phone. Mobicious raised $4 million in venture backing this year and aims to become the ultimate go-to spot for mobile content – allowing people to search for mobile content and ship it directly to their phones instead of going through carriers’ stores.

“It’s sort of a cross between Google and Yahoo in the early days when they were indexing the Internet; we’re indexing the mobile content,” said George Grey, chief executive of Mobicious.

Already, the cellphone industry has spawned new business – the ringtone industry in the United States was valued at $600 million in 2006, according to Broadcast Music, a performance rights organization. The content industry is also projected to grow more than 60 percent, from $2.3 billion in the United States last year to $3.8 billion this year, according to IDC. But many believe mobile content will have room to expand further as consumers begin to use phones more like they do the Internet.

RazzberrySync creates premium text message content – ranging from beauty and fashion tips for teens to “blitz fiction,” fiction fed to the phone in SMS chapters. And 80108 Media sends insider thumbcasts, including music reviews, event alerts and news to phones.

Many new companies are also bringing new categories of Web content to phones. Mobile social networking sites, which allow people to tap into their online network of friends when they are walking among people in the flesh, may seem a bizarre concept, but a U.S. study by M:Metrics found that already 7.5 million people, or 3.5 percent of mobile subscribers, use such mobile networking Web sites.

MocoSpace has created a social network primarily geared for phones. It says nearly a million people have signed up. RPM Communications is working toward a mobile social network that incorporates voice and sound. This year, the company launched Foonz , a service to quickly set up group conference calls. RPM says Foonz is a stepping stone toward its larger vision of a voice-enabled mobile social network.

Meanwhile, other wireless companies are trying to break the most formidable barrier to cellphone usage – the keypad. Digit Wireless integrates letter keys and punctuation into the keypad found on a standard cellphone. Vlingo introduced a beta version of its voice-based cellphone interface this month.

Nextcode in Concord, Massachusetts, is working on turning a mobile phone camera into a barcode scanner, so users can click a picture of a bar code from a poster or in the pages of a magazine and be directed to a related Web page or get content.

“People know there’s stuff out there they could be doing with their mobile phones – they just don’t know how to find it,” said Jim Levinger, chief executive of Nextcode. “They’re building out a Wal-Mart-sized amount of content for these stores, but a cellphone has a newsstand-sized interface, and you just aren’t going to buy it.”

Texting to Teens from E-Mail

AUGUST 31, 2007

Could full-sentence texting be next?

Web-based e-mail users will soon be sending text messages to mobile phones.

Yahoo! has already announced the feature for Yahoo! Mail users.

“If history is any guide, the other major e-mail providers will soon follow Yahoo’s move,” wrote MediaPost’s Wendy Davis. “In the past, whenever a major company upgraded its free e-mail capabilities, a rival soon did likewise.”

Ms. Davis noted that when Yahoo! upped the storage capacity of its free Web-based e-mail, Google followed suit within the week.

“The move also serves as a clever way to give users incentives to continue using e-mail, when many teens and young adults are increasingly turning to text messaging or IM in lieu of e-mail,” Ms. Davis wrote.

An Associated Press-AOL study conducted with Knowledge Networks in late 2006 confirmed that instant messaging trumped e-mail for most teens.

The e-mail to text link is important for marketers who target teens.

Teens preferred e-mail 3-to-1 over texting for exchanging information, according to a Harris Interactive survey conducted in December 2006.

Now, e-mail will be connected to text, making texts a PC-to-mobile activity as well as mobile-to-mobile.

Despite a preference for e-mail over texting, teens use a variety of tools to communicate. Making it easy to send texts through e-mail from any Internet connection increases the chances of getting through to them. Typing on a keyboard is easier than on a mobile keypad, so the change may also convert some former texting holdouts.

Moreover, viral text campaigns may now be spread through the Web. Since mobile phones are personal, it is very easy to annoy users with unwanted or irrelevant offers. A text forwarded from a friend, perhaps straight from an e-mail account, stands a better chance of getting opened.

The eMarketer Kids and Teens report will be published in September 2007. Please click here to be notified when it is release

New Eyetracking Heatmap: 6 Ways to Get More Webinar Sign-Ups

By Anne Holland

Webinars are the second-most popular lead generation offer in business-to-business technology marketing this year, topped only by white papers. This is rather stunning, given that nobody had even heard of a Webinar a decade ago. (But then, we’d never heard of iPods either.)

I see a lot of great, informational Webinar promotions out there. Marketers are very good at the e-mailed invites and ads in e-mailed trade newsletters. However, I must admit that nine times out of 10 when I click through to see your landing page … it stinks.

OK, I understand it’s not your fault. The Web or IT department about what you can do on your company site limits you. And when you have ideas for improvements for an upcoming Webinar registration form, they probably say something like, “Get in line.”

However, if they have an opening and you can slip in a Webinar registration page improvement project, print out this heatmap and show it to them (click to enlarge):

This heatmap is from an exclusive study we conducted this spring with real-life business executives. The goal is to determine how you can design Webinar registration pages to get better results.

Here are six lessons you may want to share with your Web designer and online copywriter:

1. The first word in every headline and paragraph has vastly more impact and influence over response rates than any other words in the headline, sentence or paragraph. Look at each first word. Is it the most powerful you can possibly use for the critical position?

2. Replicating important words — such as the topic of the Webinar and keywords for your marketplace (in this case VoIP and Internet Phone) — in multiple positions over the page can improve response. Don’t assume the prospect carefully read everything on the page from start to finish. Assume their eye flickered about and they only spotted perhaps 25% of the information. Make sure highly relevant keywords are present no matter where that eye flickers.

3. Two-column formatting, where both the informational copy and the registration form are above the fold, may help response rates. Definitely test it. However, we would strongly advise against two columns of textual copy. This print-design layout never does well in online eyetracking tests.

4. We would also advise against a third-column such as a vertical navigation bar or additional, unrelated offers above the fold. Landing pages with fewer click options, fewer path decisions, nearly always get far higher response rates.

5. Bullet points work. Bullet points often blow paragraph-style copy (with nearly the exact same words) out of the water. But, you already knew that.

6. Add immediate calls to action, such as a large “Sign Up Today.” and a bold “Register Now” even when you might think the action is self-evident. Being politely pushy can pay off.

Anne Holland is content director of MarketingSherpa.

60% of Mobile Phones Have Cameras

AUGUST 27, 2007

Three in five US mobile users now have cameras built into their handsets, up from about 40% in 2006, according to In-Stat’s “Camera Phones and Social Networking—A New Global Focus” report.

In-Stat also estimated that more than one billion camera phones would be in use globally by 2008. The firm predicted that mobile blogging and picture sharing would generate mobile data revenue for carriers.

“This growing focus provides financial opportunities for mobile device networks, social networking site operators and software developers,” said Jill Meyers, an In-Stat analyst, in a statement.

“Mobile device networks can benefit through traditional methods of data plans, as well as per-message and per-photo charges,” she said.

A smartphone’s BFF: Teens and tweens

Teen mobile phone usage is way up, and the younger consumers are hungry for new wireless capabilities. Some device makers are finally starting to catch on, writes Business 2.0’s Michal Lev-Ram.

(Business 2.0 Magazine) — Forget checking email on your cell phone – that’s soo 2004. Today’s teens are doing much more with their mobile devices. Speed texting with their eyes closed is only the beginning, and the technology can barely keep up with their rising demand for new features.

That’s exactly why adolescent consumers are a desirable demographic for phone makers and carriers hungry for data revenues – $5 a month charges for unlimited messaging and $1 song downloads, to name just a few examples – as the cost of a call per minute continues to decline.

In just two years, the number of teenage cellular subscribers has grown by nearly 26 percent (that’s a full 10 percentage points above the growth rate of 45- to 54-year-old customers for the same time period). And there’s ample evidence that teens want advanced capabilities on their phone. The same can be said for tweens – the 8- to 12-year-old crowd.

So why not make a smartphone geared toward teens and tweens? After all, they’re the ones who are driving some of the most advanced mobile trends.

“This is a group that has never known the world without mobile phones, and they’ve come to expect a lot from their devices,” says Mark Donovan, a senior analyst with Seattle-based research firm M:Metrics. “For just about every category of mobile media activity, if you look at the 13- to 17-year-old bracket they’re doing more things with their phones than the average phone user.”

According to a recent survey by M:Metrics, 47 percent of teenagers take photos with their mobile device – that’s twice the industry average. Young adults also access social networks, share pics and videos and browse the mobile Web a lot more than their older, less tech-savvy counterparts.

But despite teens’ hyperactive mobile activities, smartphones like Research in Motion’s BlackBerry (dubbed “CrackBerry” by some addicted users) and Palm’s Treo have been largely geared for the business user – older corporate customers perpetually tethered to their email.

It’s true that smartphones are expensive to develop and build, and that the underage crowd isn’t exactly the one with the most spending power. But recent mobile devices like the slimmed-down Motorola Q and the Blackjack by Samsung have already pulled smartphone prices down – they’re selling for as little as $100 (with a 2-year contract, of course).

The new generation of phones are also sleeker and more multimedia-focused than their predecessors. “They don’t want to walk around with a phone that makes them look like a dork,” says Donovan. “Style and capabilities should go hand in hand.”

It turns out kids don’t want phones that look like they’re made for kids. Case in point: Earlier this year, AT&T discontinued a child-centric, simplistic five-button phone it started selling in 2005 due to what analysts say were lackluster sales.

The maker of the AT&T phone, a Lincolnshire, Illinois-based company called Firefly Mobile, has since gone back to the drawing table to create a more souped-up phone for tweens. Dubbed the FlyPhone, the upgraded device will have a lot more than “call mom” and “call dad” buttons – it will include a camera, MP3 player, games and picture-sharing capabilities.

“Kids aren’t afraid of technology,” says Don Deubler, founder of Firefly. “The new phone allows them to do more things they want to do.”

The FlyPhone will be available through Firefly’s Web site and retail channels like TargetCharts, Fortune 500) stores by late September. According to Deubler, the device will retail for $125 without a contract. (

Other phone makers and carriers are also edging toward more advanced devices for younger consumers. Helio, a small Los Angeles-based mobile operator that actually leases its spectrum from Sprint, launched the Ocean – a youth-centric feature-filled mobile device with two sliding keypads – last March.

With its full-QWERTY keyboard, GPS service and a MySpace application, the Ocean comes close to a smartphone for teens, though at $295 (the price at which the device is offered to new Helio subscribers), it’s still beyond the reach of many of them.

What’s more, as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), Helio’s reach is limited as well. As of last released count, the company had 100,000 subscribers – peanuts compared to any one of the big four mobile operators’ numbers.

So will the big players – Sprint (Charts, Fortune 500), AT&T (Charts), Verizon (Charts, Fortune 500) or T-Mobile – start to catch on and market innovative, lower priced smartphones specifically made for young people?

“Teens have a big interest and activity online,” says Donovan, the M:Metrics analyst. “It’s natural to think you’ll see more smartphone penetration among them.”

Google’s Share of Search Traffic Continues to Grow

Google accounted for 64.35 percent of all US searches in the four weeks ending July 28, nearly four points more than the comparable period a year earlier, according to Hitwise, MarketingCharts reports.

Also according to Hitwise:

• Yahoo Search received 22.31% of searches in July (nearly unchanged from last year).
• MSN Search accounted for 8.79% (a significant 3 percentage points more than last year).
• Ask.com’s share of searches was 3.21% (nearly unchanged from last year).

The remaining 48 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.52% of US searches, the online research firm said.

While search engines remain the primary way for internet users to navigate to key industry categories, Google’s share of that traffic has been increasing significantly, according to Hitwise:

The Travel, News and Media, Entertainment, and Business and Finance categories received double-digit increases (comparing July 2007 to July 2006) in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.

Americans Use Cellphones for, Well, Calling

U.S. Still Lags Other Countries in Multimedia Use

<!–

–>

By Megan McIlroy

Published: August 23, 2007

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — American mobile users are still using cellphones primarily for calls, falling behind other countries in adopting them as multimedia devices, a new study by Universal McCann discovered.

Americans are increasingly using multimedia services on their phones, but at lower-than-average rates.

The study, conducted in June, covered 10,000 internet-connected mobile-phone users in 21 countries. It found 65% of mobile-phone usage in the U.S. is made up of phone calls, one of the highest percentages in the world. Internet usage on mobile phones in the U.S. is above the global average — the average U.S. user makes 12 visits a month — but still lags behind the leading market, Japan, where users go online an average of 40 times a month, the study found.

Need multiple strategies
For marketers, the study results mean “that if you are going to do internet and online marketing, one strategy for the U.S. may not be used as a blueprint; you have to adapt it to other markets,” said Graeme Hutton, senior VP-director of consumer insights at Universal McCann.

Americans are increasingly using multimedia services on their phones, but at lower-than-average rates. The study found 52% of Americans have taken a photo on their phone vs. 80% globally, 22% have recorded a video vs. 62% globally, and 24% have downloaded a game vs. 31% globally.

Americans’ use of other portable technology is partly responsible for the lower-than-average adoption of mobile phones as multimedia platforms, Mr. Hutton said, adding that “here we are used to having more than one mobile device; abroad it is being focused on the phone.”

Don’t want do-it-all products
Just over 60% of U.S. mobile users already own three or more devices including their phone — with more than 42% owning a portable media player, 36% owning a laptop and 67% owning a digital camera, the study found. It also found that demand for converging devices that do everything is low in the U.S. compared with other countries.

Some other findings of the study: The U.S. is the only country apart from South Korea where more people have paid for music downloads than have downloaded them illegally. More than 17% have paid for music downloads, while 15% have downloaded illegally from a peer-to-peer sharing site. Music downloads are more popular among U.S. mobile users than TV or film downloads.

Welcome to the new world of room service

Goodbye limp French fries, hello fine dining: Room service has woken up from a long, dull nap.

Whatever you want, you can get it 24 hours a day at some hotels—whether it’s on the menu or not. And it when it arrives, it may come in courses served sequentially, as in a fine restaurant. Can’t decide between the 1,000 different wines offered? No problem. The room-service sommelier will be happy drop by.

Kosher? Vegan? Gluten-free? It’s all available.

Foodies take note: In hotels worldwide, what used to be an afterthought has become a top room-service priority—in part, because customers are demanding it.

“We’re finding that baby boomers are spending more time in their rooms when they travel, just relaxing, and younger generations are spending more time in their rooms working,” says Bjorn Hanson, a principal in the Hospitality and Leisure Practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers. “As a result, there is a higher level of demand for room service, and hotels are forced to improve it.”

Options for all
For example, Peninsula Hotels, which has seven worldwide locations, including Hong Kong and Beverly Hills, launched a wellness program last year that provides healthy and organic food on their room-service menus. At the Chicago branch, there’s even an organic menu for children.

W Hotels offer room service through its Whatever/Whenever department, which means that guests can order whatever items they like, 24 hours a day, and the hotel will prepare the meal for them—even if its not on the menu. At the Mandarin Oriental in Bermuda, room-service fare expands beyond the typical seafood and meat options. Stay here, and you can order a rum and chocolate pairing or an afternoon champagne tea to enjoy in your room.

Now this is service
One of the biggest changes hotels are implementing, says Hanson, is to bring a restaurant-like experience to your room.

The Four Seasons in Washington, D.C., for example, revamped its room service last year and now offers fine dining in guest rooms instead of delivering food all together on one tray.

A server arranges a table in the room with Frette linens, white Bernardaud china and sterling silver, and delivers each course one by one. Guests call when they are ready for their next course; it may also arrive in 20-minute intervals. Start with a tomato basil soup with garlic croutons, then move on to the organic baby greens with aged vinaigrette and the milk-fed veal chop. End with the orange blossom crème brulee. If you’re not in the mood for such pomp and circumstance, it is possible to have your food delivered all together.

“We were finding that more guests wanted to eat in their rooms,” says Tiffani Cailor, director of public relations for the property. “Many are business travelers who eat in courses between phone calls, so it made sense to make these changes.”

Besides the Peninsula, The Metropolitan in Bangkok is another example of a hotel that offers healthy meal choices. Guests can order from Glow, the hotel’s restaurant that emphasizes healthy, natural and organic food using only fresh ingredients. When you order from here, there’s no need for deprivation. Choices include steamed fish in a fragrant mushroom, chili and ginger broth with greens and brown rice or udon noodles, baby corn, shiitake mushrooms and snow peas with a spicy lemon-garlic dressing.

Drink up
Given the limited wine choices room-service menus typically have, oenophiles usually can’t indulge, but that’s not the case when they stay at the One & Only Palmilla in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

Nearly a thousand bottles of wine are on the room-service list here, including Italian makes like Gaja, French vintages like Joseph Drouhin and Chilean names like Almaviva. If you need help selecting the best wine for your meal, a sommelier can come to your room to help you choose; he can even help you identify its flavors when it arrives.

The only drawback? When one’s room is so appealing, it makes sightseeing difficult.

var url=location.href;var i=url.indexOf(’/did/’) + 1;if(i==0){i=url.indexOf(’/print/1/’) + 1;}if(i==0){i=url.indexOf(’&print=1′);}if(i>0){url = url.substring(0,i);document.write(’

URL: ‘+url+’

‘);if(window.print){window.print()}else{alert(’To print his page press Ctrl-P on your keyboard \nor choose print from your browser or device after clicking OK’);}}

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20393013/

Southwest Keeps Fans From Straying
August 20, 2007
By Joan Voight

SAN FRANCISCO In its signature folksy manner, Southwest Airlines over the last two years has used techie social marketing tools, including a widget and a blog, to inject itself into customers’ everyday lives.

As other mainstream marketers are now discovering these marketing tools, Southwest shares the insider knowledge it has gained from its long-term efforts. Its experience offers first-hand evidence of what works and what doesn’t for a discount-oriented target market.

The company introduced its online “Ding” service in February 2005, before most marketers or airline customers ever heard of marketing widgets.

The Ding is a computer application—or widget—which consumers can download on their personal computers. Whenever exclusive discount fares are offered, the program emits the familiar ringing sound of the in-flight seatbelt bell. The discounts last only 6-12 hours and can only be accessed online by clicking on the Ding application. The audio cue is the same sound used with the slogan, “You are free to move about the country,” in the company’s TV campaign, which ties the service to the airline’s brand advertising.

In its first two years, the Ding application was downloaded by about 2 million consumers and generated more than $150 million in ticket sales, said Kevin Krone, vice president of marketing. While Southwest has been steadily increasing its Ding promotions with e-mail, direct mail and TV advertising, the most effective marketing method has been word-of-mouth referrals, said Krone. “The ratio of referred [Ding] installers to total installers is very high, which tells us that people who download the program often convince their friends to do it as well,” he said.

He added that the pace of both monthly Ding downloads and ticket sales has steadily increased each quarter. However, the Ding application’s effectiveness as a launch pad for the company’s Rapid Rewards loyalty program and other services has remained fixed, he said. The company declines to give conversion rates, but industry sources say 45 percent of Ding users come back to book again, compared to the industry rate of 27 percent repeat ticket sales.

Based in part on the success of Ding, the airline in April 2006 launched a “Nuts About Southwest” blog, written by employees and soliciting comments from the public. An internal search engine helps visitors zero in on the topics that interest them. Designed to give customers an inside look at the company and access to 30 cross-department employee bloggers, the blog generates a decisive response from Southwest loyalists. In July 2007, the blog attracted more than 100,000 total visits and more than 40,000 unique visitors. A blog post by CEO Gary Kelly about the airline’s consideration of assigned seating drew more than 600 comments, mainly in support of the current non-assigned seating practice.

Over the last 12 months, the blog has featured 260 posts, and has received about 6,200 comments, or about 20 per day, said a company representative.

As a result, Southwest is committed to digital social marketing as a way to drive business, said Krone. For instance, the airline is considering other online widgets that could provide travel services to customers, he said. All future initiatives will be informed by the evolution of these early efforts.

For instance, the Ding program showed that digital interaction operations must be easy. Over time, the company repeatedly simplified the Ding installation process to prevent any customer frustration. It also made the deals more selective. “Customers felt overwhelmed when we showed them all the Ding discounts to all the cities we serve. So we allowed them to filter which cities they wanted with each session,” Krone explained. “That evolved to the present system, in which customers identify the 10 cities that interest them when they sign up for Ding.”

From its blog, the company learned that talking directly with customers requires a more honest, direct approach than typical marketing. “If there is something that customers demand and you can’t change it, it is best to be transparent,” said Krone.

For example, Southwest expanded its time frame for booking advanced tickets due to customer comments, but did not go as far as some people wanted. Rather than ignore that unsatisfied minority, the blog explained company policymakers understood some customers wanted to book further ahead, would study the issue and might later expand the time window. The blog showed the marketer that “explanations and transparency are as important as solutions,” said Krone.

A McKinsey report supports Southwest’s firsthand experience with social marketing. “How Businesses Are Using Web. 2.0″ states that marketers find online discussions using collaborative and communications technologies “offer immediate value for their organizations.” Blogs, in particular, “help engage prospects and detractors in a positive and productive discussion,” thus helping brands manage their reputations, according to the March 2007 study.

Southwest says that online social marketing is a natural extension of its offline efforts to connect with customers. “It fits like a glove on a hand. We were doing social networking long before it was cool and digital,” said Krone. “If customers are digital, we will be digital. If they are online, that is where we have to be,” he said.

Travelers’ migration online shows no sign of abating. Eighty-one percent of leisure travelers and 90 percent of business travelers are shopping online, and those e-consumers are demanding both control and customization, cites a June study by Forrester Research.

A year ago, online marketers were advised to listen to online conversations to gauge what was being said about their products, said Rob Crumpler, CEO of BuzzLogic, “but as social media matures as a marketing channel, now it’s more important for brands to actually engage in the conversations.”

Google says mobile usage has surged this summer

Wed Aug 22, 2007 4:48PM EDT

By Eric Auchard

SAN JOSE, California (Reuters) – Google Inc has seen a spike in usage of its mobile services since May, partly offsetting the traditional summer slump in computer-based Web surfing for the first time, an executive said on Wednesday.

“We are seeing more and more mobile activity,” Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products, told a Web marketing conference in Silicon Valley.

Traffic to Google’s maps, e-mail and mobile searches on mobile phones and wireless handheld devices rose 35 percent between May and June. That reversed the previous annual pattern in which both mobile phone and computer use declined, the Google official said.

The much anticipated U.S. launch of Apple Inc’s iPhone Internet phone in late June led to a jump of 40 percent to 50 percent in use of Google Maps on mobile phones, according to Mayer, Google’s vice president of search.

Google Maps is one of the handful of featured applications on the iPhone.

Mobile use remained high into August, even as overall traffic searches surged then fell in the summer months. The traffic traditionally drops by 20 percent to 40 percent between May and June, as computer users in the Northern Hemisphere go on vacation.

“I think this is sort of a sign that people are becoming savvier with their mobile devices, and that there are better devices” available for the Web, while away from computers, Mayer told reporters after a presentation to marketers at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose.

“The technology curve is catching up,” she told reporters after the presentation. “The phones are just better.”

While the numbers of mobile users of Google search services remain tiny compared to the hundreds of millions of computer users of Google, the higher traffic reflects the growing acceptance of the mobile Internet, Mayer said.

While there are tens of millions of mobile searches on Google each day, they are a far cry from the billions of daily Google service requests done via computer.

So far, Google services are mainly designed for use on higher-priced “smart phones” that have faster browsers and bigger screens than typical mass-market mobile phones that are commonly used for voice-calling and text-messaging.

Mayer said internal traffic data appears to show a growing number of users switching off their computer and signing on to Google services via their mobile phones.

Google’s mobile traffic still comes largely from U.S. users, reflecting the wider number of services available in the company’s home market, including Google Maps, which offers detailed real-time traffic maps in more than 30 U.S. cities.

Japan and Europe are also seeing growing demand for Google services such as Gmail and mobile search, Mayer said.

Overall growth in the usage of Google services has begun to pick up again in the current week, as U.S. students go back to school and vacationers begin to return to work.